Okamoto Daihachi incident
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The Okamoto Daihachi incident (岡本大八事件) of 1612 refers to the exposure of the intrigues involving the Japanese Christian daimyō and retainers of the early Tokugawa shogunate in Japan. The conspiracy, motivated by the Christian daimyō Arima Harunobu's desire to retake Arima lands in Hizen that were lost in the Sengoku wars, did much to shake the confidence that the Tokugawa regime placed on its Christian subjects, and was attributed as one of the reasons the Tokugawa eventually took an anti-Christian stance, which culminated in the persecution of Christians throughout the country.
In 1543, during the wars of the Sengoku period, the Portuguese landed in Japan for the first time, and soon spread Christianity throughout Japan from Kyushu. Regional daimyō, or feudal lords, were eager to trade with the Portuguese for their European arquebus, while the Portuguese saw the Japanese as potential converts to the Christian religion, preferring to trade with those who converted. Trade and religion thus tied, many daimyo became Christian, such that at the eve of unification of Japan by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1600, as many as 14 daimyo at the time were baptised.[1] Even when some of those Christian daimyo supported Ieyasu at the decisive Battle of Sekigahara, many other Christian daimyo rallied around the heir of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In any case, the question remained for the unifier of Japan where the Christian lords' loyalties ultimately lay.
Arima Harunobu, the daimyo of Hinoe Domain, became one of the most important supporters of the Church in post-Sekigahara Japan as Tokugawa Ieyasu became shōgun and purged his enemies, like the influential Christian lord Konishi Yukinaga. In the first decade of the Tokugawa shogunate, Arima Harunobu was able to keep his fief and was given the right to send red seal ships to trade overseas. In one of these voyages in 1608, the crew of a red seal ship belonging to Harunobu became involved in a deadly quarrel in Portuguese Macau after coming back from Cambodia to fetch a cargo of agarwood for Ieyasu, resulting in 50 Arima samurai being killed under the orders of the Captain-major André Pessoa (Red Seal Ship incident).[2] The same captain-major came to Nagasaki on the Nossa Senhora da Graça to trade in 1609, and Arima Harunobu took this opportunity to seek permission from Tokugawa Ieyasu to avenge his dead men. Ieyasu acceded - although the Portuguese controlled much of the Nanban trade, Ieyasu sought to decouple the close relationship between that trade and Christianity. Arima Harunobu thereupon took a flotilla of 1,200 men to attack Pessoa in Nagasaki, and after a three-day engagement, the Nossa Senhora da Graça sank in an explosion bringing Pessoa down with it on January 6, 1610. However, this victory for Harunobu soon led to his downfall.